Qualified Goals in the Cabal Solver
Posted on March 27, 2015When you ask cabal-install to install one or more packages, it needs to solve a constraint satisfaction problem: select a version for each of the packages you want to install, plus all their dependencies, such that all version constraints are satisfied. Those version constraints come both from the user (“please install lens version 4”) and from the packages themselves (“this package relies on mtl between version 2.1 and 2.2”). Internally cabal-install uses a modular constraint solver, written by Andres Löh. It was first presented at the Haskell Implementor’s Workshop in 2011, and is based on the paper Modular lazy search for Constraint Satisfaction Problems.
For the Industrial Haskell Group, Well-Typed has recently extended the constraint solver to deal with qualified goals. In this blog post we will explain how this constraint solver works by means of a running example, and look at how the new qualified goals change things.